Paperbacks

By Nicholas Bagnall

12:01AM GMT 12 Mar 2002

The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis (Vintage, £8.99)

MARTIN AMIS admits to having grown kinder over the 30 years covered by these ephemera, and gently apologises for some of the insults, often nicely aimed, that he enjoyed hurling. What has not changed is his insistence on an old-fashioned examination of the text in front of him, rare in contemporary lit-crit. Whenever he thinks he's getting above himself he deftly brings the temperature down with a touch of straight talking. And he usually has something new to say, whether about Jane Austen (even) or Wodehouse, or a book about football thugs. The title essay is a fond and sparkling examination of Joyce's language in Ulysses.

SS1: The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler by Hugh Thomas (Fourth Estate, £7.99)

HUGH THOMAS is the forensic science expert and conspiracy theorist (not to be confused with Hugh Thomas the historian) who startled everyone with evidence that the prisoner in Spandau thought to be Rudolf Hess hadn't been Hess after all. Here, with similarly surprising detail, he tells us that Himmler didn't commit suicide in 1945; the corpse was a look-alike, while the architect of the Holocaust was trying to revive the defeated Reich elsewhere with funds that eventually helped Germany's economic recovery. It makes for a gripping, often sordid read (Himmler's early life is particularly well described) and some of it may even be true.

Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer (Fourth Estate, £8.99)

HERE'S a collection of articles by the most significant (his word) animal rights philosopher today. Peter Singer's main plank is a plea for non-discrimination between human and non-human animals; to deny life to a functioning beast while granting it to a defective human is speciesist, he says. Such stark logic gets him into some strange positions, but he fights back nobly and with a certain finesse. His other plank is the need to deny ourselves riches and give to the poor, a philosophy I seem to have heard elsewhere.

The Truth About Dogs by Stephen Budiansky (Phoenix, £7.99)

THEY separated from wolves about 14,000 years ago and became scavengers living off our rubbish tips, until they decided they could do better, ingratiated themselves with humans and got a place by the fire. Several millennia of genetic development have guaranteed dogs a soft spot with us whenever they decide to look appealing. In exchange they were expected to keep off intruders, but we have the worse of the bargain, says Stephen Budiansky, a dog-loving scientist. Alarmingly, too, though the figures he gives didn't quite convince me, he suggests that selective breeding has made the domestic dog likelier to bite you than are its wild cousins.

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (Vintage, £7.99)

WHEN this book came out in 1990 Peter Ackroyd confessed that it had taken him eight years to write. In the hardback edition an imaginary interviewer asks him whether he "liked Dickens at the end of it" to which he replies that he "never did like or dislike him" and wanted only to understand him; but he certainly makes us love the monster, and he himself became so familiar with him over the years that he even imagined some conversations with Dickens's ghost, for which he was mocked. They are omitted, however, from this abridgement, as are the bibliography and source notes.

THE physician Simon Forman was unusual because of his meticulous case notes, which, with his diary, make him a splendid subject for Elizabethan historians. Judith Cook has enjoyed herself among the archives, but one becomes so dizzy with his romps and his quarrels and with the quaintness of his cures that one forgets to ask whether he was a good doctor, or - as fellow-physicians claimed - a quack. In the end Miss Cook concedes that his success rate was high for the time. Unlike his detractors, he treated plague victims as well as the rich and famous. And he plainly had a seductive bedside manner.

NB

The Same Sea by Amos Oz tr by Nicholas de Lange (Vintage, £6.99)

A WIDOWER is comforted by a woman friend, then by the girlfriend of his son, who has gone to Tibet to find himself but, instead, finds comfort in the arms of another woman, while his girlfriend takes a lover . . . Emotional triangles proliferate so fast in The Same Sea that the novel has something of the virtuosity of a geometric equation. But despite its clever construction, the book is primarily a work of feeling. The veteran Israeli novelist Amos Oz has captured, with masterly assurance, the bitter-sweet perplexities of old age.

The Wise Woman Philippa Gregory (HarperCollins, £7.99)

WHERE other historical novelists waste their energy on pseudo-period flourishes - "quotha", "sirrah" and the like - Philippa Gregory concentrates on telling a good story with the minimum of affectation. The story of a nun who has to live by her wits after her convent is burned down by henchmen of Henry VIII is pleasingly simple and direct. As the ex-nun dabbles in witchcraft to defeat a rival in love, she faces the wrath of an Establishment which has scant understanding of the ways of women.

A Son of War by Melvyn Bragg (Sceptre, £6.99)

SET in the Cumbria in which Melvyn Bragg grew up, the second instalment of his saga of post-war England is so heart-rendingly good that it has the reader clamouring for more. The evocation of time and place is immaculate - it was a masterstroke to start the story in the infamously cold winter of 1947. But it is the characterisation that sets the book above other tales of childhood. The growing boy, loved, if not always treasured, by parents who find themselves pulling in different directions, is a figure of genuine pathos.